‘Woman’ and the Time of Nation in Garrett’s Travels: Take Two
Ana Paula Ferreira
At the end of the impressively long epistle addressed to his sister-cousin, Joana, Carlos, the alter-ego of Garrett’s fictional writer in Travels in My Homeland (1846), wraps up the gift of his much traveled flesh and soul with a note of longing for familial paradise. While reportedly having been raised to follow “the tranquil glory and modest delights of a good family man,” he claims to have lost himself to imagination “intoxicated with poetry” (242). He goes on to deny any direct responsibility for the fate making him “renounce for ever domestic hearth,” adding unequivocally, “I did not make myself what I am” (242-3). Lest Joana or the virtual reader conclude that the influence of Romantic literature is solely to blame for his derailment, Carlos goes back in time to identify the culprit of all losses in the grandmother, “the author of hisand our misfortunes” (Garrett 242-3; emphasis added).
A structure of narcissistic-aggressive projection is here exhibited between the subject of enunciation, who dismisses self-authorship, and the noun phrase imprecating the grandmother as male-inflected “author.” By attributing the male gender to a twice figure of motherhood, Garrett’s enfant du siècle absorbs and displaces the feminine in a characteristic move to forge a male-centered androgynous identity, as Diane Long Hoeveler has shown in relation to the English romantics. Yet, Carlos’ maneuver must also be understood within the historical frame of the emergent Portuguese liberal nation-state, specifically with reference to the changing position of women in the family. Although slow to take root, that change is announced as early as the first liberal experience of 1820, when what is to become the central nineteenth-century “problematic” (i.e. women) begins to be discussed in Portugal (Serrão 328-29).[1] The clash between Woman as pervasive ideological sign of the Eternal Feminine and women as an unstable human reality impossible to contain within the newly reified civil sphere of the family may account for Carlos’ alleged inability to embrace fatherhood and patriarchy under liberalism. That clash may also account for his destruction of women, so that the feminine as poetic principle may survive within himself. In fact, Garrett’s Romantic hero would rather turn the grandmother into a parody of masculinity-cum-authorship than to accept the agency of those (i.e. women) who would have begin to put in doubt the original pater familias role as basic ordering principle of society.[2]
The difference that Carlos’ letter calls forth and simultaneously places under erasure sits on the specter of his death mother, symptomatically foreclosed in his hysteric epistolary discourse. She hovers between the grandmother damned with the curse of first causes and the grand daughter, Joana, left to perish without accomplishing the life mandate of virginal consolatrice that her cousin’s missive bequests upon her. Suspended on the fault line separating the public and private, or State and family, in the liberal nation-state emerging in the 1820’s,[3] the absent mother points to a temporal elsewhere; a time much too Real to be delimited by her son’s indictment of frustrated paternity / authorship. The elliptical maternal may, in fact, be the text’s implied metonymic axis. It is what makes each of the fragments of Travels in My Homeland a performance of dissemination and constant crisscrossing of all socially ascribed meanings pertaining to the impossible question of being, root of all fictions of identity. Poised on yet another time beyond Joana’s time, the reader is thus involved in a moving textual weave that is as much an appeal of genealogical reference as it is a slippery gift of libertine Romantic language memorializing Carlos’ manque-à-être as, specifically, male national subject.[4]
The present study aims to analyze the place assigned to women in the textual transit or signifying process foregrounding the construction of that failed subject, who rides on the wave of the anti-Enlightenment disclaimer,“I did not make myself what I am.” The term “process” is here used advisedly, to imply both the baffling unfolding of meaning through metonymical substitutions and the almost juridical proceedings that result from it, as will be here followed in detail. I would like to suggest the centrality of female characters as bearers of temporal heterogeneity in the textual play eroding all fictions of reference, paternity, and self-presence.[5] I ground this centrality in the history of women, of nation and of the literature that is born with and simultaneously constructs both Nation and Woman on the temporally contradictory model of the family. While the latter, following Anne McClintock’s argument, appears to stand for the supposedly “natural,” continuous and homogenous history of the nation, as a liberal institution the family is alienated from the state, from history and its temporal unfolding (91-2).[6] Garrett’s Travels point clearly to how feminine characters are, on the one hand, the stronghold of what is supposed to be permanent and essential to nation and, on the other hand, how women, as such subjects of difference, insert the institution of the family in history. A critical approach that is not blind to this double temporal-semantic engenderment can possibly bring us closer to what is the most tantalizing contradiction of a text that mirrors itself poetically as well as politically on the paradoxical construct of the “belo sexo.”[7] The myth of femininity that underlies this construct may find cultural and literary validation in duplicitous Romantic “toilettes,”[8] but its ghastly extension lingers over and, perhaps, beyond Garrett’s witty dramatization of personal, familial, and national doom.
Inserting difference in the narrative of the “homeland”
It is not a coincidence that Travels in My Homeland insistently engages, as a whole, not only images of women per se but, specifically, constructions of gendered identities and gender relations, for the text is an experimental attempt to represent national time in a non-linear and non-totalizing way. Through his fictional writer-narrator, Garrett positions himself against the Eurocentric narrative of historical progress inherited from Enlightenment reason and utilitarianism.[9] He exploits a typically Romantic fragmentary and digressive style that privileges not the public events and figures of historical “cursive time,” but what Julia Kristeva, inspired by Nietzsche’s distinction, describes as “monumental time.” This is the cyclical time-space of “reproduction and its representations”; what, despite historical and cultural specificities, evokes a broader range of female experience relating diagonally to the linear time of national history, a “father’s time” (Kristeva [1979]: 189-93).[10] Following Rousseau and, particularly, the German Romantics, Garrett’s sources for this archaic, cyclical modality of time intersecting linear historical time are condensed in legend and romances, unpretentious oral narratives that register “episodic circumstances of a known and proven feat of magnitude” (Garrett 189).[11] One such hypothetically traditional narrative inspired in an anonymous oral source—“this is the story [. . . ], as it was told to me” (66)—is that of green-eyed Joaninha, the maiden of the nightingales (italics in the original).
That story, a long digression related metaphorically to the all-encompassing metonymy of “travels in my homeland” (Macedo 19), is conjectured upon a secluded window. “The window awoke my interest,” the narrator reports; “It charmed me, it had me there as if spellbound” (65). Not surprisingly, the seductive window is marginal to the public world of national history, where the travels of the writer-narrator and his companions take place. The group of men recalls, in fact, the concept of the nation as “a deep, horizontal comradeship,” a “fraternity” (Anderson 16).[12] Inasmuch as the narrator appears to distance himself from the others once captured by the mesmerizing sight of the window, the latter may be said to instill a poetic interruption in the process of homosocial male bonding constituting the “prose” of the (liberal) nation.[13] It is by virtue of such a standstill that the window can set the scene for the emergence of a symbolic episode of private life. Similarly to what occurs in Homer’s Odyssey, to which the narrator ironically compares his own writing / “travels” (Garrett 67), that domestic story cuts across and sheds light on the public events surrounding the construction of modern Portugal, and of its constitutive national subject.
Presented in a series of frequently halted, visually plastic scenes, from Chapter X until the end of the book, the maiden’s story outlines a writerly journey of personal discovery. This narrative conjoins in one common epilogue the narrator’s and his companions’ journey to city of Santarém. Or, the dream-like, spell-binding frame of a feminine home window onto which is grafted an imaginatively fertile episode of the vox populi not only opens to but cannot be extricated from the father’s / author’s public narrative of the “homeland.”
In effect, the bits and pieces composing the embedded story point towards a hypothetically truer or more valid national memory while setting off the corruptions of varying kinds to which official historical monuments and documents are subjected, as part of what Eric Hosbawm describes as “the invention of tradition.”[14] The eighteenth century earthquake could have indeed “interrupted the thread of all our national architectural traditions” (Garrett 152). Yet, it is the imperative of political substitution authored exclusively by male figures that accounts for the perversion of “taste” in national monuments (as happens, for example, with the church of Santa Maria de Alcáçova).[15] The “us” constituted by the makers, builders, and writers of history is therefore to blame for the overall and continuous representational violence perpetrated by male-centered historical as well as historiographical exploits. This is forcefully put forward in the textual mise en abîme of the book’s final scene, where the writer’s fictionalized double confronts the complex and humanized character of Friar Dinis. The climax of the meeting comes at the point where politics and writing are discussed in relation to “one of those liberal broadsheets” read by both. “Well written and partly true. We were to blame, certainly, but the liberals were no less”—asserts Friar Dinis; to which Garrett’s traveling liberal responds, “We have both made mistakes” (245). The attempt to recognize such common mistakes is, in part, what propels the narrative process, one outlining a pilgrimage of sorts through the stations of degraded national monuments.[16] The dilapidated or adulterated public buildings that the narrator is given to see in Santarém are not, however, any more reproachful than written accounts that similarly set on stone a perverted and “foolish” version of national history. As Carlos would have it, “What do they [the historians] know of the causes, the motives, the value and importance of almost all the facts they recount?” (241).
In an attempt to correct what goes down in history as disembodied, supposedly disinterested, and hence uniform and absurd facts, Garrett exploits the “performative” dimension of the so-called poetry of the people over and against the “pedagogical” narrative transmitting the fiction of a continuous and cohesive national community.[17] As if to contextualize, to lend socio-historical depth to the legend featuring the cyclical time-space of the nation’s physical and symbolic reproduction (featured in the maiden’s story), Garrett first calls attention to subjects of difference normally excluded from patrilinear “pedagogical” history. They are “the minority, the exilic, the marginal, and the emergent” (Bhabha 301), representing non-consensual local cultures and histories resistant to homogenization within the official “father’s time.” A good illustration of these local cultures appears in Chapter I, with the lively description of a group of twelve men composed of two contending subgroups “in every respect [ . . . ] antipodes” of each other (Garrett 24) as well as of the socially hegemonic group of Lisbon travelers. Representatives of each minority group within the larger group of marginal subjects in the liberal nation, the “campino” and the “ílhavo” emblematize dichotomous poles in the not only regional but, also, cultural and racial construction of masculine Portugueseness, the former associated with “African races,” the latter with “Pelasgian stock.”[18] The scene is obviously more than a quaint ethnographic note of standing north-south rivalries. The debate between the two men is a telling sign of the disjunction, the non-assimilable differences of the various regional, socio-cultural and racial formations, not to speak of the various individual histories, exhibiting the multiple fissures underlying the modern nation as a horizontal “brotherhood of men.”
The text’s opening dispute stages, on the other hand, how such typical performances of competition among men overpower and ignore other subjects of difference, who are relegated to the margins of the national community. Witness, for example, the narrator’s disparagement (in Chapter VII) of “the nasty, repulsive villains one so frequently comes across in similar places in my country” (51). Named only to serve as contrast to “the master of the house,” owner of the Cartaxo café that welcomes the city travelers, the apparently undesirable populace represents an emergent threatening political force that Garrett deliberately excludes from his post-miserabilist narrative of the “homeland.”[19] This textual erasure is worth questioning in a narrative that supposedly pays tribute to the behind the scenes of national life; to what, indeed, would soon enter the scene of public history in revolutionary, popular feminine garb.[20]
Feminine figurations of natio and nation
The sweeping political, social, and cultural transformations brought about with the rise of liberalism—“This necessary and inevitable upheaval the world is going through” (Garrett 23)—cannot, in effect, but crystallize the exclusions inherent in the concept of a homogenous nation-people. Among these, but unlike the textually dismissed “repulsive villains” to whom they are obliquely related, women become the privileged signs of national difference in Garrett’s Travels. They are at the center of the “inevitable upheaval” simmering both inside and outside the borders of the homeland’s windows. This may be the reason why it is not until Chapter IV that the first reference to woman appears, precisely to uphold modesty in ironic contrast to the vanity of those public men representing Portugal.[21] Such a feminine virtue summons the sphere of affective relations as an ideal corrective or therapeutics for the legal / political nation. It becomes apparent, from the end of Chapter IX, where the first consideration of femininity as locus of national habitation occurs. This is done in reference to the old Duchess of Abrantes, whom the fictional writer-narrator reportedly had met during an earlier sojourn in Paris. Despite the Portuguese affiliation signaled by her name, she is said to be “the perfect embodiment of the Frenchwoman, the most alluring woman in the world,” having merited the exclamation, “‘How comfortable one feels here!’” (62).
The nostalgic remembrance of a time, woman, and national habitat in all respects foreign to the present homeland takes place just before the scene shifts to the valley of Santarém, in Chapter X, where the maiden’s story is due to begin. An ambiguous frame of reference is thus set up in relation to a female “national type” synonymous with a time-space of nationhood.[22] The heterogeneous female figures emerging from the legendary maiden of the nightingales’ window sharply contrast with the bygone glitter of the old “French” duchess, “that beauteous star of the empire surrounded by all the splendour of her decline” (Garrett 62). Standing worlds apart from the Duchess of yesteryear as well as from the remaining female figures is Georgina, a British specimen of a very different type of feminine “allurement” on the rise throughout the first decades of the nineteenth century. Still, the enlightened, independent, and altruistic lover of the once exiled, liberal Carlos appears in the national scene (or the textual “homeland”) only after the native, supposedly innocent feminine subject makes her appearance. It is not surprising that the writer-narrator refers to the latter with the diminutive, “Joaninha”; she points to the interior, unpolluted place of birth maintained and reproduced through blood ties and theoretically remaining outside of the nation’s historical time and its system of relations of affiliation.[23] The English woman, conversely, is an ostensible metonymy of a similarly idealized but external, rational, morally responsible civil nation composed of free individuals not strictly bound by kinship ties.[24]
Carlos (and the narrator with or through him) would surely love to have both women—the atemporal, child-like natio and the changing historical, if foreign-cultured, nation—in the privacy of his recently re-discovered, if disjointed, “homeland.” This may be why he is unable to choose between one and the other. Cameos of very distinct, but each in its own way feminine habitats, they equally step out of home boundaries in demand of his love. This is where the trouble begins: for all his progressive, anglophile self, Carlos is threatened to the point of inaction by two only superficially antagonistic figurations of feminine nationhood moving freely between the private and the public terrains to actively pursue him. No matter how “angelic” in semblance and demeanor their author insists in fixing each of them, Georgina and, especially, “our interesting Joaninha”[25] display a want and self-determination that escape the bounds of his congealing masculine gaze. In other words, they both escape enclosure in private, purportedly ahistorical and asexual domesticity.[26]